TOTD 8: The Believer's Tale
by robinwitch1
Summary: Tales of the Dragonborn, 8. Stuck in Dragon Bridge on a trip that yields no new information, the Synod researcher receives an unexpected visit from a temple attendant whose god has sent her there to be told the truth about an incident in the Dragonborn's past.


The Believer's Tale

I had planned to stay in Dragon Bridge for three or four days, in the local inn, but in less than a day I seemed to have exhausted the potential of the area, at least for research purposes. It was a larger settlement than it had been in the Dragonborn's time, but as I knew even before I arrived, the Penitus Oculatus post that had been there before, which had been the town's only unique feature, had long since been repurposed as a temple of Arkay and the local Hall of the Dead. Apart from the usual stories, common knowledge, there seemed to be almost no memory of the Dragonborn there. The only obvious trace of her was a heap of bones topped with two dragon skulls piled up by the road on the bridge side of the inn, and a tavern tale of how she had taken on both of them at once and brought them down before they could kill a single guardsman or villager. But such battle stories and impromptu monuments were common enough, and there was nothing special about this one. I didn't need more proof that the Dragonborn had killed dragons.

Unusually for summer, the weather was filthy, with high winds and torrential downpours of rain. Just after sunrise on the morning of the third day, I was watching the dismal scene outside from the window of my room, wondering where to go next. Solitude was the obvious choice – I had shipped most of my books through to there – but the Jarl was just recovering from a serious illness, and my contacts had told me to put off any visit until he and the court were less preoccupied with matters of the moment. The only other promising point of interest in the vicinity was the temple of the Daedric Princess Meredia, Lady of Infinite Energies, or Lady of Life, as her followers had taken to calling her. It was large, and unusually for a daedric shrine, there has never been even a cursory attempt to conceal its existence. For centuries, it has loomed over the main Solitude – Dragon Bridge highway, the temple and its statue of Meredia easily visible to all who passed.

As an inveterate foe of the undead, Meredia has always been classed with Azura and a handful of other Princes as one of the "good," or at least tolerable, daedra. Her temple had been in ruins and occupied by some obscure necromantic cult when the Dragonborn came onto the scene. The Dragonborn and Serana had cleared Meredia's temple – something of an irony there, since as a vampire, Serana herself was one of the undead – and as a reward, the Dragonborn had been granted Meridia's daedric relic, the enchanted sword Dawnbreaker, which had gone to the Dawnguard after the Dragonborn's passing and had later been returned to her temple. Meredia's faithful have always been good citizens and well-connected in society, if sometimes inconveniently ardent in their pursuit of the undead, and so the authorities turned a blind eye when the temple was reopened and then, over the years, repeatedly expanded.

Meredia's followers have been _very_ reluctant to accept the informal peace treaty with the Volkihar vampire clan. Even more obsessive than the Vigilant of Stendarr, they reorganized and rebuilt their temple, and then went after their prey with a single-minded fury. Their passion ran deeper and darker than that of the Vigilants, in the same way that worship of the Daedra taps into a more primal level of the psyche than does reverence for the Aedra. At first, I had been told, they had even sworn to defy the truce, until a combination of patronage, "friendly advice," and arm-twisting from various of the Jarls had convinced them to fall into line. But they weren't happy about it, not one bit, even decades later.

Most of this had been told me weeks earlier by the Vigilant of Stendarr, who found themselves in a conflicted position when dealing with a Daedric cult that shared their attitude towards the undead. Members of the two organizations tended to keep their distance, so I suspected the information from the Vigilant was shaded towards the negative. They had warned me that despite the early patronage of their Lady, the Dragonborn was even less popular among the followers of Meridia than she was with the Vigilant, and to expect a chilly reception, at best, to any questions about her. Was the hostility worth braving for the potential gain? I watched the rain pour down as the dawn light became stronger, and could not decide.

My absent-minded musing was interrupted by a hesitant tap at the door of my room. I opened it to find the innkeeper's wife peering at me with a worried expression on her face.

"Sir? There's some woman I've never seen before. Says she has to talk with you. But when she came through the door she was soaked to the skin, and she'll be sick to death if I don't get her warmed up and into some dry clothes. Would you like me to show her in when I've got her fixed up a bit? Or perhaps talk to her in the hall by the hearth, that might be better. She's as cold as a corpse right now."

This was odd. I hadn't been expecting any visitors – not many people knew that I would be passing through here – and since the woman was a stranger to the innkeeper, she must be from outside the Dragon Bridge area.

I asked, "Did she walk here or come by carriage? On horseback, perhaps?"

The innkeeper replied, "I'm thinking that she must have come on foot, sir. From where, I don't know. There's no horse or carriage outside, and I don't think anyone has passed by yet, so early in the morning with the rain coming down like a judgment on us. She wasn't carrying anything either, and her dress, I've never seen before, like a healer's but not the same. From the Forsworn in the hills, maybe, but she doesn't look at all like one of them. My daughter's been trying to talk with her but she won't say much, only asking if you are here and if she can see you."

"Asking for me? Asking how? By my name?"

"No, sir." The innkeeper shook her head decisively. "She just calls you the Imperial looking for the Dragonborn. No more than that. Her name is Ilsef, she says."

After a pause, she added, "She's a little... shaky, I think, sir. Repeats herself a lot, but some of what she says isn't clear. Perhaps it would be best to talk to her by the hearth, where we can all keep an eye on her."

I nodded. "That's a good idea. Tap on my door, then, when she's ready. I'll come out and we'll see if we can work out where she's from and what she wants with me."

-o-o-

The tap at my door was a long time coming. I didn't in fact meet Ilsef until late in the evening; she fell asleep before the fire, and the innkeeper didn't have the heart to wake her. That gave me more than enough time to run through, and run out of, hypotheses as to her origin.

Most probable, on the face of it, was that she was Forsworn, but dressed unusually for some unknown reason. Attendant or emissary from some high-ranking hagraven, perhaps? Over the last few decades, the Forsworn hadn't provided even a fraction of the drama they had during the Dragonborn's time, but the unsteady truces with their various bands remain the weakest points in Skyrim's general tranquility. Although no formal treaties have ever been signed, the general understanding has been similar to that reached with the dragons: stay in the places that no one else wants as the price of being left in peace, and keep the roads clear. Some bands trade with the lowlands; a few, more enterprising than the rest, even lease out mining and timber concessions to Nords who have reconciled themselves to paying a token fee for what their ancestors had simply taken. Nevertheless, the various bands of the Forsworn still clash with each other now and then, and their internal politics remain a mystery to outsiders.

But Ilsef wasn't one of the Forsworn, she was quick to point out. Indeed, she seemed to find the idea a bit amusing. She followed the Lady of Infinite Energies, she said, as an attendant at the temple of Meridia, and had had been there ever since she was a young girl, when she had been orphaned and the temple had taken her in.

We were sitting across from each other at a small table that had been placed by the side of the fire-pit in the center of the inn's main chamber. The innkeeper and her daughter had drawn away to give us some privacy, but I could still feel their gaze upon us from the shadows, lending the scene a curiously theatrical ambiance. Ilsef herself was a tall, middle-aged woman, gaunt and unsmiling, now dressed again in her white temple robes, which could not entirely conceal how thin she was. She was a Nord, a Skyrim native, although she had no living relatives, she said. Her most striking physical feature was her hair: long and thick, and a reddish-blond that I remembered from _Supplementary Notes on Racial Phylogeny_ to be the rarest natural color among the human races.

"I can see you're not one of the faithful," she said abruptly. "Not to my Lady, not to anything. I can see it in your eyes, how you hold yourself. There's nothing beyond for you. You may say there is, but your heart's not in it."

I'd heard the accusation before, that Imperials such as myself believe in nothing other than a vague and formulaic courtesy and are incapable of profound emotions or deep religious belief. Even our characteristic talent, our racial endowment, is seen as no more than an ability to smooth-talk others. We have nothing in the way of _true_ religious belief, members of the other races say with resigned shakes of the head, and so we can never hope to see as they see, hear as they hear. A Nord can understand something of the call of the Hist, for instance, and with a little effort, an Argonian can imagine how Nords felt when the Thalmor forbade the worship of Talos, but most Imperials have always been strangers to that otherwise common ground of faith, or credulity. It is a note too high, or too low, for our voices to sing.

"I suppose not," I said deferentially. "But others use the information we provide, priests and believers among them. We uncover the material; they search it for what they find useful and significant. There's been enough romance about the Dragonborn. We need more solid evidence."

"So do I," Ilsef said. "When I heard that you were here, I left the temple, without permission from my superiors... we are supposed to shut the world out and serve our Lady... But I no longer feel safe there. I am surrounded. Besieged. At night I can hear them, even in the temple. When our voices fall silent, they begin to whisper. All our efforts, our prayers to our Lady... And She says nothing, does nothing. As if it didn't _matter_."

Her voice rose steadily higher, steadily louder, as she spoke; the last few words were almost a shout. She took a deep breath, almost a gasp, and began again in a tone that was almost normal.

"We are taught... taught the history of the Lady's worship and our temple... we're not supposed to read other things... But I was talking with one of our worshipers, an old lady, she must have been very old to have seen some of the things she was talking about, and she confused me. I prayed for guidance, but all I received were nightmares. Always the same one, coming back, again and again. Vampires and screaming."

"I'm a bit lost here," I said gently. "I want to hear your story, but it's not easy to understand. How did the old lady in the temple confuse you?"

"After she spoke to me, the nightmares came back, and I began to think... that she was one of them too, sent to destroy my faith. But the others thought that was absurd. They said I was working too hard, that I needed more sleep. I don't know what anything is any more. I don't know what I live for."

"What do vampires have to do with it?" I asked, wondering if my question would indicate sincere interest, or whether it would set her off again.

She stared blankly into the fire for a long moment, and then began to speak, to the fire, not to me. Her voice was low and dull, drained of emotion, as if confessing to something before a magistrate.

"I was born near here, up in the hills. At the edge of Forsworn territory. I can't remember my father or mother, they had died somehow, or gone away... I never knew. My grandfather raised me. Just the two of us. My grandmother died before I was born.

"I remember I was happy there. When I was very little. My grandfather dealt with the Forsworn, lumber mostly... we visited them in their camps, and sometimes they came down to our cabin to talk about which trees could be cut and which had to be left alone. I remember my grandfather telling me that some of the trees were very important to them. I suppose it was religious. It might have been something to do with the spriggans, I think.

"I remember how the old women with their tattooed faces fussed over me when we visited them, and gave me nice things to eat and little dolls made of feathers and bark. I would bow to them when they gave me something, like a proper little Nord girl, and they would laugh and clap their hands and bow back... They were good people, kind, trustworthy. Sometimes my grandfather got a bit impatient with their strange ideas about trees, but they were good people and good to us.

"And that's the way it was until I was seven years old... And then I came to the temple. I had the nightmares for years afterward. They prayed for me every day, and the nightmares stopped. It took years. And now they've come back. They're hunting me again. They never give up. Never."

Her voice trailed off here, and she was silent for a moment, glancing toward the door, the windows, and finally the shapes of the innkeeper and her daughter shadowy at the other end of the hall. Then she leaned forward and whispered, like a conspirator in a play put on by amateurs.

"Do you think _she's_ one of them? Her eyes don't look right. They try to hide the eyes, but you can see it if you look hard. Something underneath. It's what they _really_ are. It keeps on peeping out from underneath, like a nervous mouse. That's what happened to my grandfather. He didn't look hard enough. Always too kind, he wouldn't have noticed, he didn't have that sort of a mind. He saw it too late. One of them killed him and now they're coming for me. But I know what to look for. They won't get me as easily as they got him."

I pointed out, as gently as I could, that if the innkeeper and her daughter had been vampires and interested in feeding on her, they would have done it while she slept during the day. A look of panic crossed her face, and she clutched at her neck, hands, arms, rubbing them until she was sure there was no puncture anywhere. Finally, she nodded and said half to herself, "Not today. Not tonight. At least not yet tonight. The night isn't over yet. Maybe they're just very patient. Or maybe they're not hungry. They might be feeding on someone else."

"I'll get you your own room," I responded, trying to think of the best way to reassure her. "They lock from the inside, you know. You'll be safe there until you're properly rested and the rain eases up a bit. Where are you headed for, by the way? Whiterun?"

She thought over my question for a moment and then looked toward me with a lost expression on her face. It almost appeared as if she _hadn't_ had a destination beyond Dragon Bridge, and my question had reminded her, pushed her into thinking it over, for the very first time.

"I suppose so... I don't know. I've never been there. Are there any vampires in Whiterun?"

"I doubt it. And if there are, they're very well hidden now and not attacking anyone any more."

Ilsef shook her head impatiently and glared at me, as if I were a slow child.

"It'll just be worse in the end. Rotting from the inside out. One day they come out, and it's all over. You never see them until it's too late."

This line of talk was making Ilsef more tense by the second. I decided it would be prudent to shift the topic a bit, toward myself.

"Why did you ask for me as an Imperial who studies the Dragonborn? And how did you learn who I was? No one here knew what I was here for until I arrived and explained it to them. Did one of them visit your temple?"

Ilsef shook her head.

"No. I had another dream a few nights ago, not the nightmares, a new one. I heard our Lady's voice in my dream and saw this inn. She told me to find an Imperial there if I wanted my questions answered. One who studies the Dragonborn. She said that you would explain everything to me."

_Wonderful_, I thought sourly. _Now one of the Princes has her eye on me. Never a good sign. _But I continued in the same gentle tone that I had used before.

"I'm still quite confused. You came to the temple because... your grandfather was killed, is that it? Why did you leave the temple, then? The Lady's shrine must be far safer than here, especially when you're dealing with the undead. No vampire would ever dare set foot there."

"He was screaming. Not with pain at first, with anger. He was an old man, and it was too strong for him. I hid under the bed and listened to him scream. They were just outside, in front of our door. I'm sure it came for me, but my grandfather wouldn't let it pass. But he was too old. For years after, I heard the screaming in my dreams. First in anger, then in pain. It tore him apart slowly, because he had hurt it. It took so long about it that others heard the screaming and came. Soldiers. Dawnguard. There were two women in black with them who were magic users. I remember how angry they sounded when I first heard them. Furious. They were saying something about 'damned ferals.' I don't know why that phrase stuck in my head. Maybe because of the way they said it, the disgust and anger.

"They broke down the door of the hut and found me under the bed and hugged me and cried. They cleaned me up and told me what a brave man my grandfather had been. They didn't need to tell me he was dead. They told me the Forsworn would honor him too and remember him, because they had been hunting the vampire as well, but had never succeeded in catching it. You see, my grandfather had at least broken its leg. With an ax. That was why it was so angry, why it wanted to hurt him so much. It knew it was going to die, that he had as good as killed it. If the Dawnguard hadn't finished it off, the Forsworn would have tracked it by the blood and found it and dealt with it themselves. They burn vampires alive, you know. If I had heard it screaming, part of the debt would have been paid. But the Dawnguard shot it dead with silver arrows. They burnt the body afterward, someone told me later, but that isn't the same at all. Not at all. Arrows are too quick. It didn't scream even once, not once. I wish I had heard it scream.

"I don't remember very much about what happened after they found me. One of the women in black carried me out of our hut, through the blood. I closed my eyes and held onto her tightly, but I could still smell it. I can still smell it. And I never wanted to be someone who could tell the difference between a scream of anger and one of pain. I heard them every night for years, and they're back now. Back for me. They know where I am and there is no one to protect me now, no one with an ax, just prayers and I have come to think that prayers are useless and idle words. I studied my Lady's teachings for nearly forty years but Her ways are a mystery to me and I do not know anything any more.

"I need to find my grandfather. Someone like him. Someone who will stand in front of my door with a sharp ax and give me the time to sleep without dreams and then to think clearly. I will know when I have the answer. When I am safe again. When the nightmares stop, I will know I am safe. Are there men with axes in Whiterun, do you know?"

As Ilsef spoke, my mind was at work, like a loom, weaving together the bits and pieces into a connected story. Her grandfather must have been killed by one of the last feral vampires remaining in the wild, one that had settled in the border region between Forsworn territory and the lowlanders to try to evade them both. No doubt the Forsworn would still remember him; they don't forget people who die to defend their families, and he had been a friend. He might even have been elevated into one of their local deities, though I had no intention of going up there to check. The Dawnguard patrol must have been tracking the vampire, but it would have needed Forsworn permission to operate in their territory. At any rate, it had arrived just too late to save her grandfather.

I wondered if she knew whom the two women dressed in black had been. Probably not, and I realized at once that it wouldn't be a good idea to tell her. They must have been Volkihar vampires, helping the Dawnguard track their defiant kinsman, the 'damned feral,' and put him down. She had sought refuge from the terror of a vampire's attack in the arms of another vampire. I knew that would be too much of an irony for her to accept. Silent, she was staring at the innkeeper again, obviously suspecting her to be complicit in the vast vampiric plot that she felt was closing in on her. I wondered, briefly, how long it would be before I became part of that plot. If nothing else, the paranoid are predictable.

"Yes," I said. "There are many men with sharp axes in Whiterun. It's a Nord city. You should be safe there."

-o-o-

Ilsef's story seemed to take the last of her strength, even though she had just woken from sleep. After she finished, we sat for a long time in silence as she watched the innkeeper and her daughter move about doing their chores and getting ready for bed. I briefly considered pointing out that vampires usually sleep during the day and get up at night, but decided that the less she was reminded of the topic, the better. Besides, the innkeeper's daughter would be staying up most of the night in case any late guests came in.

Finally, Ilsef broke the silence again. She had produced a small book and was paging through it nervously, more as something to do with her hands than to read it. It looked to me like one of those collections of miracles or doctrine most of the temples hand out to their believers in return for a small contribution. Like many of that type of book, it attached to her wrist with a decorative cord, so that if it were dropped it would not be profaned by striking the ground.

She looked up at me from the book and smiled. A thin, sad, brief flicker of a smile, but the first I had seen on her face all this time.

"When I grew up, I became a copyist in the Temple. One of their best, one of their fastest. And never a mistake. Never. After a few years, I knew all their books by heart.

"This is a history of the Temple and our Lady's worship in Skyrim. It tells how rich and powerful the Temple was in the middle of the Third Age, and how it declined when bandits arose and made it hard for worshipers to travel. Toward the end of the Third Age, there was disease there. They say it was sent by Peyrite, because he was angry at all the attention my Lady had received. That my Lady was loved by mortals, while he had no one – no one at all. He is one of the least of the Princes, and has no temples or priesthood of his own, I have been told, but he commands disease and he sent a plague down onto my Lady's believers because of his jealousy.

"In normal times, it would not have made much of a difference. My Lady is stronger by far than Peyrite, and skilled in the healing arts. She gave the priests a formula in a dream that would have cured the plague and protected against it. So the jealous spite of Peyrite was frustrated, but the book says that a greater Prince then saw his chance to strike at my Lady, Molag Bal, the King of Rape and forefather of all vampires. Perhaps it was so, or perhaps the story mentions Molag Bal because he is connected to the undead, or just to be more dramatic.

"At any rate, the story claims that a necromancer named Malcoran was sent by Molag Bal to take advantage of the plague before the believers could heal themselves fully. Malcoran murdered everyone in the temple, turning their spirits into an army of corrupted shades to do his bidding. He would not have succeeded even then, but one of the priests who escaped Malcoran's attack took the Beacon of Meridia with him, to preserve it from harm, or so he thought. Instead, he broke Her link with the temple. Otherwise the Lady of Infinite Energies would no doubt have destroyed Malcoran herself, or so the book says. The priest who took the Beacon was robbed and murdered by bandits a few days later, and the Beacon passed through a multitude of hands thereafter. None of its possessors was fit to be an instrument of my Lady and so She spoke to none of them. Instead, She cursed them with ill luck, it is said, so that they would quickly be overcome by another who might be more suitable. But by chance or the wicked contrivances of my Lady's enemies, there was no one of that sort for many years."

"Until the Dragonborn, you mean," I said.

Ilsef nodded, and then frowned.

"Until the Dragonborn. The Dragonborn found Meridia's Beacon and our Lady commissioned her to clear Her temple and restore Her healing light. And so she did, with lightning bolts and fireballs. She struck down and burned up the corrupted shades, releasing them to the peace of death, and killed Malcoran with a single blow from a holy sword when he faced her before the great altar. Before the altar, she was given Meridia's sacred relic, Dawnbreaker, and pledged Meridia to use it to slay the undead without mercy. And so it was, until the end of her life and the return of Dawnbreaker to the renewed and rebuilt Temple. Some even say that the Dragonborn used Dawnbreaker to deliver the killing blow to Alduin in Sovngarde, calling upon the Lady of Infinite Energies for strength."

I must have smiled at that last assertion, because Ilsef shook her head, slowly and a bit regretfully.

"It probably wasn't like that in every single detail. You're right. Believers sometimes take things a bit too far. But I always believed the Dragonborn had wielded Dawnbreaker against any and all undead for the rest of her life. Until the old lady talked to me and told me that wasn't the way it had been, not at all. And my Lady would not answer and I was confused, until She told me to come here and ask you. So is the story true, all of it? Or part of it, or none? You must tell me. It is my Lady's will."

There was a long silence then. She stared at me while I tried to find the right words to tell the truth in the way that would harm her least. Then I gave up. If I held anything back, Ilsef would just learn it from someone else, later, and then she would disbelieve everything that I said now.

"The Dragonborn wasn't alone when she cleared the Temple of Meridia. She had a companion, a vampire. They were together for the whole time the Dragonborn was campaigning against the dragons. They fought for the Temple side by side under the eye of Meridia, and your Lady never objected. It seems She knows that there are vampires and vampires, some that hate the mortal races, and some that are willing to live in peace with them. Your grandfather helped to kill one of the last of the haters. It's been a couple of decades at least since any feral vampire has attacked anyone in Skyrim."

"That is what the old lady told me as well," Ilsef replied. Her voice was barely above a whisper. "So it is true. That the unclean hands of a vampire helped open the Temple to us again. That the Dragonborn never used Dawnbreaker at all, for fear of hurting her undead companion. That she just hung it on a wall where it gathered dust. And my Lady...She never complained. She let it happen. To tolerate the undead walking the halls of her own Temple, to accept aid from a vampire. To honor one who did not keep her oath to destroy the undead, no matter where, no matter whom, no matter when. Who broke the oath at once, and kept on breaking it for her whole life. I cannot see how this could be allowed by the laws of gods and men, and I do not know if I know anything any more."

"But did she make any oath of that nature?" I replied. "All that my books said was that she pledged Meridia to lead Her guiding light through Her temple and banish Malcoran. She did that, and the Temple began to recover from that time on. Perhaps that was all your Lady required of the Dragonborn and her vampire companion. The gods can turn anything to good, the old proverb says."

"With a vampire by her side..." Ilsef paused and looked hard at me. "And the old lady said that they were lovers. That Meridia's champion slept each night in the arms of a vampire princess. Is that true as well?"

"If you want to put it that bluntly... they were together for a long time, yes," I answered. "But their ways parted eventually, and the Dragonborn herself was certainly never a vampire."

"You say. They say. What if she was? I admired her, so strong and able to defend herself. And she was with the enemy all along. The Temple says that none of that is true, but I think my Lady sent me here to learn that it has been true, all along. That I have spent my lifetime listening to lies, telling lies, copying lies. That even She will smile on the undead, if the time and place and task are right. But why? Why did She send me here to be told that She is a liar? I am so confused. I cannot see any plan or purpose in this. Only that there could be vampires in the Temple too, that there is no place they are not, that there has never been a place they are not... That I have no hope at all of escaping them. Nowhere to run and no one to protect me." And she began to cry.

Then I made a final, fatal mistake. Probably because she was crying and I was upset and confused as well. I forgot where we were. Just as if it had been Cyrodiil, good old let's talk it over, we can work it out Cyrodiil, I tried to tell her everything would be all right.

"I wouldn't worry too much about vampires, especially Lady Serana. She's got the Volkihar clan firmly under control, and there are no other vampires in Skyrim today. She works with the Dawnguard, you know. Draugr and liches and that sort...there are still a few of them. But the commoners are safe from vampires at least. The Volkihar are going to extend their control over the vampires in other provinces as well, and sooner or later there will be no vampire menace anywhere in Tamriel. That's Lady Serana's plan, anyway, and I think it's going to be approved by the Imperial Court..."

With such a hopeful story to tell, I had slipped into lecturer mode, familiar to any academic, where your nose is in a stack of notes and you are not so much discussing as delivering. That was how I managed to get as far as I did, and say as much as I had said, without noticing the reaction of my audience.

Ilsef's absolute silence made me look up at that point. She had turned chalk white and her entire body was rigid. Her hands, which had been resting on the table before, now gripped its edge tightly. She was staring at me, a fixed stare, like a terrified animal, or the corpse of a person who had died of some agonizing disease, before Arkay's servants had done what they could to soften the visage for the funeral ceremonies.

She shuddered, gulped for air, and finally forced out a question.

"_Lady_ Serana? Is that the vampire that they say was at our temple with the Dragonborn? Have you seen her? _Have you seen her?_"

This seemed like a good time for a lie, but I didn't think I could be convincing enough. Ilsef's rigid gaze told its own story. She had already decided.

"Yes, she was one of those I was directed to meet when I came to Skyrim. At Castle Volkihar. She hardly ever leaves there now."

The last was for reassurance, but more than half a lie in reality. Serana was in Cyrodiil now, negotiating details of her prospective vampire fiefdom with the court. More than an honored guest, a valued one, with the power to perform important services for her hosts. I stopped myself just in time from adding these outwardly reassuring facts. Not that it made any difference in the end.

Ilsef's face went blank. Completely dead. She looked toward me and said, almost casually, "Then I suppose you're one of them too. See? I was right. They're everywhere. That's what my Lady meant to teach me. Nothing is any use any more. In Her loving grace, She pitied my hopeless struggle, and now She has put my mind at rest. For that, I praise Her."

She got up and moved toward the door of the room I had rented for her, and then turned again, one last time.

"Thank you. You have fulfilled the role my Lady set for you, just as the Dragonborn fulfilled the one that She set for her. I think I know my path again. We will talk again, perhaps, Scribe of the Synod. But tonight, there has been a great finishing of things, praise to Her grace. May She keep you in Her loving light forever." Then she went to her room, walking steadily again with her hair glowing in the firelight, and locked herself inside.

When I awoke, she had disappeared. No one saw her leave or knew when she had departed, or to where. The rain was slashing down again, and I half expected her to return to the fireside sooner or later. But she was never seen in Dragon Bridge again.

-o-o-

When I left Dragon Bridge two days later for Winterhold, after receiving a message from the head librarian at the College, there was still no sign of Ilsef. The only clue was her temple amulet, which a child found dropped on the bridge, under the great looming dragon head that gave bridge and village their names. Presumably she had let it slip in her flight, though it was hard to imagine how that could have happened. There was nothing else, and the local residents had better things to do than conduct an endless hunt for an enigmatic stranger. Most assumed, as did I, that she had headed for a Forsworn camp and taken refuge there. The Forsworn were customarily tolerant of the mad, seeing them as touched by the gods, so if she had gone to them, she would have been treated well enough even if they did not remember her grandfather.

Near the end of my trip, weeks later, when I was in Riften wrapping up my investigations, a courier brought a message from the priest of Arkay in Dragon Bridge. How he discovered where I was, the gods alone know. It was a brief note, to tell me that a week or so after I left, Ilsef's remains had been found by a crabber. She had thrown herself off Dragon Bridge, some time in the early morning of the day she vanished, and her body had been carried far enough downstream that it could not be seen from the village or the road. She had jumped unclothed, the priest added, or her clothes had been torn off when she hit the water, and of course the body was battered from the fall and had begun to decompose. It was only from her height, and the unusual color of her hair, that she could be identified at all.

Only one other thing had been found with the body, the priest added, gripped tightly in what had been its hands. It was a religious text of some kind, one of the homilies that the Temple of Meridia distributed among believers, but only the spine and the two covers were still intact. I suppose it was the one she had been carrying when we talked that night, the temple history. The title was no longer legible, the priest wrote, and all the pages of the book had been ripped out. The crabber had found a few tattered pages caught in brush along the banks of the river in the same general area as the body, but all were soaked and illegible.

I had suspected as much already, before the priest's message. I could see her in my mind's eye, the tall, thin form dressed in streaming white, already drenched in the rainstorm, stumbling down from the village and over the bridge. There should have been a guard there, at the village end, but in these times of peace the filthy weather would have driven him away from his post to take refuge under the roof of the sawmill or on the porch of the Hall of the Dead. She must have reached the middle of the bridge and looked up to see the stone dragon head staring down at her, and suddenly decided that all the axes and ax-men in Whiterun would never be enough to keep her safe. There was only one place she could flee to that the vampires could not follow. Where her grandfather had gone, where she could hide from the undead among the uncounted legions of the dead.

So she had taken her sacred book and torn out the pages she had once been so proud to write, to give them to the wind blowing down the river valley into the depths below. And then the priestess robes of the faith that had failed her, pulled off and tossed impatiently into the violence of the air. That must have been when her necklace fell to the road, too heavy with faith to follow. And then, finally, her own self, all she had left, climbing to stand unsteadily on the low side wall of the bridge, holding tightly to the covers of her book, an empty shell, like her heart. Did she slip on the rain-slick stone? Or was she pushed by the wind and fell awkwardly, in fear? Probably not; in that case, she would have lost her grip on the book that was still in her hands when she was found, and cord or no cord, it would have been torn from her grasp. Most likely she had looked out into the night toward her old temple and bent her head one last time to the deity who could no longer protect her, leaning forward until the darkness reached out to accept her, the only thing left that she could trust.

I hope she met her grandfather again, somewhere, and that he explained everything, better than I had, told her that there would never be another little girl woken at night by the sounds of a death-struggle between the person she loved most and her greatest terror. Told her that he no longer needed his ax for anything but cutting wood, and she could sleep without fear of nightmare. Or perhaps all she had found was eternal night; that would at least end her fear, a peace of a kind.

I sent some money back with the courier to the priest of Arkay at Dragon Bridge, to pay for a modest tombstone and the customary services for her spirit. Follow precedent, the Imperial reflex: _let us now do what is done in cases of this sort_. And, I suppose, what is done _was_ done for her, in due course, even though the benefit to her – or to anyone – is, as always, difficult to determine exactly.


End file.
